In the darkness of your room
Your mother calls you by your true name
You remember the faces the places the names
You know it’s never over
it’s relentless as the rain
— Bruce Springsteen
There’s no such thing as the Great American Novel. Many get close — Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Beloved, The Sound and the Fury — but the American experience is just too vast, too diverse — too teeming — for a single book to hold all that weight. Just the same, American cinema has a few would-be Great American Films, movies that utilize quintessentially American imagery to reflect on what it means to be an American, for good or for ill. But any film that dares to look under the bed of Americana to shine a light on the creepy crawlies hiding there does so in the shadow of The Night of the Hunter, the only movie in the American canon deserving of the word singular, and the closest the movies ever got to a true Great American Film (except, maybe, The Searchers, which covers The Night of the Hunter’s critical blind spot of race). If America is the City upon a Hill, The Night of the Hunter is the darkness on the edge of town, and it still illuminates for us, 70 years on, how that darkness is integral to the American spirit.
The Night of the Hunter is a once-in-an-artform confluence of talent. Longtime actor Charles Laughton moved behind the camera for the only (credited) time in his career and enlisted a murderer’s row of heavyweights to put their arms around silent-era style and drop it right into the world of 1955’s narrative sophistication: cinematographer Stanley Cortez concocts Biblical imagery to catapult James Agee’s brutalizing script about the Great Depression to the level of pure fable. The Night of the Hunter is an honest successor to masterpieces like Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and The Passion of Joan of Arc — and there’s a wildly cocky iris-in that stands toe-to-toe with any from Intolerance. But what really gives the movie an edge on its countless imitators is its perspective: it’s told from the point of view of a child.
The story of America can really only be told from the perspective of a child because only a child can really believe the story of America; told by anyone else, it immediately takes on an ulterior motive. “Dream, my little one, dream,” a children’s chorus croons over an opening credits sequence set to a starlight night. The first face we see is not the face of a child, however, but of silent movie superstar Lilian Gish. “Beware of false prophets,” she reads to a gaggle of disembodied toddler heads, “which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” She sets the table for us: there are wolves lying in wait behind every corner of The Night of the Hunter, and, indeed, American life. But she too is a mythmaker, and The Night of the Hunter goes on to show us how in concentrating all of our energy into the obvious wolves, the ones who peacock their greed and wickedness, we collectively hold a secret close — even dear — for fear of it getting out: the ouroboros of capitalistic exploitation and religious zeal keeps our country afloat. Trumps and Reagans and Goldwaters and McCarthys are merely the faces of a deeper oppression, and if we look carefully and confront it, we have nothing to fear. “Fear is only a dream,” the chorus continues, and The Night of the Hunter frees us to wake from that dream.
The main action of the movie begins with a group of children playing hide-and-seek. When one of them goes to hide in a cellar, he discovers two legs sticking out on the rickety stairs leading downward in an image reminiscent of the most frightening moment in The Wizard of Oz. Already the film has taken on the heightened quality of American fantasy, but it gets better: bouncing away from the scene of the crime is Harry Powell — a titanic Robert Mitchum, shark-toothed and sing-songy — driving to find his next victim. “You say the word Lord, I’m on my way,” he announces. He justifies his murderous streak with the Bible itself: “Sometimes I wonder if you really understand,” he says looking up at the sky, “not that you mind the killings. Your book is full of killings. But there are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smelling things, lacy things, things with curly hair.”
Laughton launches us from Powell’s Model T into a burlesque show. No establishing shots, no transitions, just the hard juxtaposition of religion, hatred, and sex. We see the burlesque dancer through a keyhole — we’re peeking into a world we’re not supposed to see — but when we cut back to Powell watching the show, he’s in full, clear view: he’s part of this world. Laughton tilts down to Powell’s lefthand knuckles, which read “HATE,” as he clenches his fist and reaches for a switchblade in his pocket — it’s the kind of efficient visual storytelling that’s all but forgotten in American cinema. He triggers the blade — a sly innuendo for an erection, or maybe castration (there’s a non-zero chance Powell is a deeply closeted gay man) — only to stop himself before God. “You can’t kill a world,” he groans. From Powell’s perspective, he’s the only one who’s good in a world of dirty, filthy people. A certain taxi-driving protagonist finds his forefather in a character like Powell.
But despite all his screentime and the fascination he holds — he really is one of the greatest and most potent characters in all of American fiction — Powell is not the protagonist of The Night of the Hunter; instead, it’s John Harper, a boy thrust into the world of adulthood before his time. John, traumatized by the arrest and death of his father following a bank robbery, is beginning to see through the lie of American folklore, and when his father is hanged and children skip down the street and sing a song about it, he tells his little sister Pearl to stop after she joins in. John sees that violence, like religion and prejudice, is learned and passed down, and he’s inoculating himself to it in real time. Yet he’s not altogether immune to the small-town charms indigenous to the American south.
It’s crazy how much aw-shucksing there is in The Night of the Hunter. David Lynch gets the credit for coaxing the malevolence out of Eisenhower-era surface level pleasantness, but spend 10 minutes in The Night of the Hunter’s America and you see clearly how he made an entire (successful!) career out of ripping it off. The aforementioned shot of the burlesque dancer is practically identical to the one of the Lady in the Radiator toward the end of Eraserhead, to name but one of Lynch’s many heists, but his greatest theft is the one of tone: Laughton’s West Virginia is full of earnest, wisdom-dispensing characters like old lady Icey, the owner of an ice cream parlor, and Uncle Birdie, a well-meaning seaman. Once Powell barrels into town to steal the money John’s father hid before his arrest, Laughton films the collision with due Chiaroscuro ambivalence: darkness and light, like love and hate, are necessary for each other to exist, and that’s the Lynch modus operandi. Inside Icey’s ice cream parlor, Powell gives his legendary love and hate speech. What’s often forgotten about that scene is that right after the showstopping yarn, Icey’s fudge boils over. “My, that fudge smells yummy,” Powell yelps. “It’s for the picnic,” Icey crows with a smile that smashes the boundary between heartfelt and unsettling. “And you don’t get a smidgen of my fudge if you don’t stay for the picnic.” But Laughtonian just doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as Lynchian.
Powell does quite a number on the Harpers, starting with brainwashing their mom, Willa (a truly disturbed Shelley Winters). She’s obsessed with morality, believing herself to be the reason her husband Ben committed the robbery. “Help make me clean so I can be what Harry wants me to be,” she prays. Throughout the movie, images of virtue in American life appear, but they’re too obvious, too generously placed: Abraham Lincoln presides over Powell’s court hearings, for example. The film does espouse a moral point of view, yet it also understands how morality, particularly Christian morality, can be corrupted to support avarice, and Laughton plays an entire community’s corruption out on the face of a single woman. Willa gets this initial orgasmic rush of purity, but on their wedding night Powell throws it back at her; in a tent revival service, she’s crazed with zealotry; finally, by the time she wises up to Powell’s scheme, she’s shriveled and half-dead. When she does die, it’s revealed in an image that will forever be etched in the unconscious of the American cinematic tradition: strapped to a Model T at the bottom of the Ohio River, her hair waves gently with the moss. It’s a haunting “from dust ye came, to dust ye shall return” moment, but Laughton wastes not: it’s still a storytelling shot. Uncle Birdie’s fishhook gets stuck on the car, launching us into the film’s second half.
If Laughton had stayed in that small town and all we got was Powell wreaking his havoc with outsized Rococo flourishes, it would have been enough — but love, real love, finds its way in the back half of the movie. The children escape Powell’s grasp, embarking on a picaresque journey with their father’s skiff. They find hope in the pastoral, narrowly avoiding Powell’s grasp and being delivered, as if by God, into the arms of Rachel Cooper, the same prophetic figure we met at the beginning of the movie.
But Powell just won’t give up. Returning to Rachel’s homestead with a copy of Modern Movie magazine (“I’ve been bad,” she says holding it close to her chest after her interaction with Powell, the shot a nice memento from a time when movies could titillate and disrupt), Ruby, one of Rachel’s take-ins, admits that she was “out with men.” Rachel demonstrates genuine compassion for Ruby, consoling her. “You were looking for love, Ruby, in the only foolish way you knew how.” Much like how silent cinema is Laughton’s stylistic Virgil, Rachel is a beacon of hope for these children. Within moments, however, Powell shows up at her door. He tries getting through to her with lies, with the love and hate speech (she cuts him off), and finally, with threats of violence. “I’ll be back when it’s dark!” he shouts.
Darkness and light find their synthesis in these two characters. In a chilling climactic sequence, Powell sits on a rock outside Rachel’s home, reprising the Christian hymn he’s been singing the whole movie, and Rachel responds in kind: love and hate, darkness and light, are not merely complimentary — they are one. She gets him, chases him into her barn out back, and keeps him there like a caged animal until he’s apprehended by the police in front of John. It’s a sequence that restores our sensitivity to the immense power of America: it makes children of all of us.
John’s response to Harry’s arrest is the crucial inflection point for the movie, and it demonstrates Laughton’s deeper interest in the stories we tell ourselves in order to keep America alive. Good has won, but it’s a false victory. John is triggered back to his father’s arrest, and he projects his dad onto Powell. He throws the money kept safely inside of Pearl’s doll back at Powell, lying on the ground in custody and weeping over having to hold the impossible weight of a moral figure — a father — burdening him with, as The Night of the Hunter superfan Bruce Springsteen would later write, “debts no honest man can pay.” All of a sudden, it’s Christmastime. The town is manic with delight over the imminent hanging of Powell, and John is at peace following his trial. On Christmas morning, John gives Rachel an apple: he hands over the knowledge of good and evil; he has no further use for it. Rachel gives him a watch in return. “Children abide,” she says. “They abide and they endure.” They do endure, but every child grows older, and the watch is ticking. Love puts Hate down for the time being, and Laughton knows the story is not over. Back at the ice cream parlor, Icey congratulates Powell on his tale. “I never heard it better told,” she says.
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